'Ann, there is great trouble in the world. I need your help. I need this collar off so I may go help.'
That's what I am here for, Richard. To help. What is the trouble?'
The Keeper ...'
The Nameless One,' she corrected.
'What difference does it make?'
'Calling him by his name calls his attention.'
'Ann, it's just a word. It's the meaning of the word that matters, not an arrangement of letters. Do you think that when you call the Keeper the Nameless One, instead, that he would be fooled into thinking you weren't speaking of him? It's a mistake to assume your enemies are ignorant, and you are clever.'
A hearty laugh rose from in her chest. 'I have been waiting for a very long time for someone to figure that out.'
She paused with him at the edge of the pond, and he asked, 'What is "the pebble in the pond"?'
She gazed out over the water. 'You are one, Richard.'
'You mean there are more than one?'
A small stone floated through the air, up into her hand.
'Everyone has an effect on others. Some people inspire others to do great things. Some take people into crime with them. Those with the gift affect those around them even more. The stronger the Han, the stronger the effect.'
'What does that have to do with me? What does that have to do with a pebble in a pond?'
'You see all the duck weed floating on the surface? Say that's the other people, the world of life, and this pebble is you.' She tossed the stone into the pond. 'See what happens? The ripples caused by you affect everyone else. Without you, all those ripples would not have happened.'
'So they float up and down, on the ripples. But the stone sank.'
She gave him a humorless grin. 'Don't ever forget that.'
The answer gave him pause. 'I think you invest too much faith in me. You don't know anything about me.'
'Perhaps more than you think, child. And what is it that concerns you about the Keeper?'
'Something must be done. He's about to escape. One of the boxes of Orden has been opened, the gateway is open. The Stone of Tears is in this world. I need to do something.'
'Ahh.' She smiled as she drifted to a stop. 'So you, who was just thrown up against a wall by the Han of a mere Sister, wants to go off and battle the Keeper himself?'
'But things have happened. Something must be done.'
'I see you have been talking to Warren. A very bright young man, Warren. He is still young, though. Sometimes he needs direction. Guidance.' She tipped a branch closer. 'He studies hard, and loves those books. I think he must know every smudge on them.'
She was inspecting a flower on the branch. As he watched her in the moonlight, he decided he might have thought himself more clever than he was. Warren, too.
'So, what about the Keeper? What about the Stone of Tears?'
She put her arm back through his and walked him on. 'If the gateway is open and the Stone of Tears is in this world, Richard, why does the Keeper not have us? Hmm?'
'Maybe he's about to swallow us all at any moment.'
'Ahh. So you think that maybe he is busy with his dinner, and when he is finished, and wipes his chin clean, he will get around to swallowing the world of the living, so you want to rush off and close the gateway before he picks his napkin from his lap? Is this the way you think the worlds beyond ours work? In the same terms as this world?'
Richard nervously raked his fingers through his hair. 'I don't know. I don't know how it all works, but Warren said ...'
'Warren does not know everything. He is but a student. He has a talent for the prophecies, but he has much to learn.
'Do you know why we keep the prophecies down in the vaults, and restrict who may read them? For the very reason we are having this discussion. Because prophecy is dangerous to the untrained mind, and sometimes even to the trained mind. There is more to things than you see, or the Keeper would have us already.'
'Are you saying we're not in danger?'
She smiled a sly smile. 'We are always in danger, Richard. As long as there is a world of the living, there will be danger. All life is mortal.'
She patted his arm again. 'You are an important person, a person in prophecy, but if you go off foolishly, you can cause more harm than good. The Stone of Tears being in this world cannot, in itself, allow the Keeper to escape through the gateway. The Stone is a means to that end.'
'I hope you're right,' he said as they walked on.
She glanced up. 'How is your mother doing?'
Richard looked off into the darkness. 'She died when I was young. In a fire.'
'I'm sorry, Richard. And your father?'
'Which one,' he muttered.
'Your stepfather, George.'
Richard cleared his throat. 'He was killed by Darken Rahl.' He darted her a sidelong glance. 'How do you know my stepfather?'
She gave him one of those timeless looks that he had seen from others before; from Adie, Shota, Sister Verna, Du Chaillu, and Kahlan. 'I'm sorry, Richard. I didn't know he had died. George Cypher was quite a man.'
He came to a stop, his flesh atingle. 'You,' he whispered. 'You are how my father got that book.' He left the statement vague enough that she would have to fill in the details to confirm it.
A little of her smile came back. 'Afraid to say it out loud? The Book of Counted Shadows, that is the book you are speaking of She gestured to a stone bench. 'Sit down, Richard, before you fall down.'
Richard slumped to the bench. He looked up as she stood before him. 'You? You gave that book to my father?'
Actually, I helped him get it. You see, Richard, as I told you, you and I are old acquaintances. Of course, the last time I saw you, you were bawling your head off. Only a few months old, you were.'
She smiled distantly. 'If your mother could see you now. She was bursting with pride over you. She said your were the blessing to balance the curse. You see, Richard, balance is what the world of the living is all about. You are a child of balance. I have much invested in you.'
Richard's tongue seemed stuck to the top of his mouth. 'Why?'
'Because you are a pebble in the pond.' Her eyes seemed to go out of focus. 'Over three thousand years ago, wizards had Subtractive Magic. None since has been born with it. We have been hoping, but none, until now, has come into this life. A few have had the calling, but not the gift of it. You have the gift for both Additive and Subtractive Magic.'
Richard shot to his feet. 'What! Are you mad!'
'Sit down, Richard.'
The quiet power of her voice, her penetrating gaze, her presence, made him sink to the bench. For some reason, she seemed suddenly very big to him. She was the same size as before, but it felt as if she towered over him. Her voice became imposing, too.
'Now, you listen to me. You are causing me a great deal of trouble. You are like a bull that keeps knocking down fences and trampling the crops. Too much is at stake to have you acting without knowing what you are doing. I know you think you are doing right, but so does the bull. Your problem is lack of knowledge. I intend to give you an education.
Though you will not believe some of what I have to tell you, you had better come to accept it, or you will be in that collar a good long time, because it cannot come off until you accept the truth.'
'I was told the Sisters took the collar off.'
The look in her eyes made him wish he had kept his mouth closed, or that he could trade places with the two Sisters who were to take a public strapping.
'Only when you accept yourself, accept your ability, your true power, will it come off. You put the Rada'Han around your own neck. We don't have the power to take it off until you can help us, with your own power. The only way you can do that is to learn, and to accept who you are.
'Now, first of all, you must understand about the Keeper, and the Creator, and the nature of this world. Your problem, the problem most people have, the problem Warren has, is that you try to understand the worlds beyond in terms o
f this world.
'Good and evil, the Creator and the Keeper, are chaos divided into two opposing forces. Although each abhors the other, they are interdependent, and cannot exist one without the other. They define each other. The struggle, our struggle in this world, is maintaining the balance.'
Although Richard kept his mouth shut, he couldn't keep the frown from his face.
'From the Creator springs life, the soul of life. It blooms into this world. Without the Keeper, without death, there can be no life. Without death, life would be open-ended.
'Can you even imagine a world in which no one ever died? Where every child born lives? Forever? Where every plant that sprouts flourishes? Where every tree lives forever, and every seedling sprouts and grows to a tree?
'What would happen? How could we eat, if we could kill no animal, or harvest no crop, if it all lived forever and could not die? A never-ending life of gnawing, ravenous hunger? The world of the living would be consumed by chaos, and destroy itself forever.
'Death, the underworld as some call it, is eternal. You think of it in terms of this life. In eternity, time has no meaning, no dimension. To the Keeper, a second, or a year, has no meaning.
'It is through those in this world, who serve him, that the Keeper is given the dimension of time. It is their urgency that drives his struggle, because they understand time. He needs the living if he is to succeed. His promises to those who help him are seductive, and they hunger for his triumph.'
'So what part do the living play in this?'
'We divide and define the chaos with order, and keep it separated: light and dark; love and hate; good and evil. We are the balance.
'We are like the duck weed floating on the surface of the pond. The air above is the Creator, the depths below, the Keeper. The souls of the living, which have come down from the Creator, blossom to life in this place, and when they die, they descend to the world of the dead.
'But that does not mean it is evil. Evil is a judgment we put on it. The Keeper is like the muck at the bottom of the pond. Spirits of the dead reside anywhere from the depths of that chaos and hate, near the Keeper, to near the living, near the light of the Creator. It is the hope of the living to spend eternity in the warmth of that light.
'It is we, the living, who separate, and define the worlds to each side of life. Magic is the element that gives this world the power to do that. Magic is the balance point.
The Keeper would like to swallow the world of the living, to triumph. To do that, he must eliminate magic. But at the same time, in order to triumph, he must use magic to tip the balance.'
Richard struggled to keep his head above the murky waters of confusion. 'And wizards have the power to influence this balance?'
She was still leaning over him. She held up a finger. 'Yes. You have both sides of the magic.' Her smile evaporated in a way that took his breath with it. 'That makes you an extremely dangerous person, Richard.
'You have both sides of the gift; you have the power to mend, or destroy the veil. There are good people who, if they knew of your power, would kill you in a twinkling for fear you might destroy us all, if not deliberately, by accident.'
'And you? Are you one of those?'
'If I were, I would not have helped your father get the Book of Counted Shadows. Your involvement stopped the immediate threat, but it also fed the gateway magic, and chances greater danger in the future. It was a risk I had to take, because the consequences of not doing so would have been disaster. But if what has happened is not fixed, it will be greater disaster in the end.'
'What is the veil? Where is it?'
She reached out and tapped his forehead. The veil is within those of us with magic. We are its custodians. That is why balance means so much to those with the gift. When the veil is torn, the balance is tipped. The further it tips, the more the veil tears.
'The Creator rules his domain, the Keeper, his. The Keeper needs the Creator to feed him life, the Creator needs the Keeper to allow it to be renewed. The veil keeps the balance.'
Her face was grim. This view would be considered blasphemy by many. They see the Keeper only as evil that must be destroyed. But to do so would ultimately accomplish the opposite - all life being swept away like a sandbar in a river flood.'
'Just for the sake of argument, what if I did have both kinds of magic? What is my power for?'
'Most wizards have a talent that leans in a particular direction. Some are healers, some make things of magic, more rare are prophets. The most rare are war wizards. There has not been one born in over three thousand years. Until you.'
Richard wiped his sweaty palms on his pant legs. 'I don't like the sound of that.'
'War wizard has two meanings which balance each other, as in all things magic. The first meaning is that they can tear the veil, bring destruction and death - war. And the second is that they have the magic needed to fight against the powers of the Keeper. Being a war wizard does not mean you are evil, Richard. Many who fight do so to protect those who are defenseless. It means you have the capacity to care enough to fight, to defend the innocent.'
'"Lest he who's born true can fight for life's bond. And that one is marked; he's the pebble in the pond."' Richard quoted.
She lifted an eyebrow. 'For one who professes to scoff at prophecy, you seem to know some of the more pivotal passages. If I'm not entirely addled, I expect you have been marked.'
Richard could feel the scar on his chest as he nodded. 'Are you saying that my life is already marked out? That I'm just meant to live it out, as it has been preordained?'
'No, Richard. Life is not predetermined. The prophecies mean only that you have potential. You have the ability to influence events. That's why it is so important for you to learn.
'Of most importance is that you learn to accept yourself. If you do not do this, you will harm the most vital part of yourself: your free will. If you act without understanding, you could cast yourself into the chaos.
'I let you live when you were born because you have the potential for doing good. Within you is the hope of life. But until you truly accept both sides of your magic, you are a danger to every living thing.'
Richard desperately wanted to change the subject. He felt as if the world were crushing him. 'What is the Stone of Tears?'
She gave a little shrug. 'In the world of the dead, it exists as a force. In this world, it exists as an object with power, representing that force.
The Stone of Tears is like a weight that holds the Keeper at the infinite end of his world, where his influence here is diminished to the point of balance.'
'Then if it's here, off him, he is freed from his prison.'
'If that were true, we would all be dead. Hmm?' She lifted a questioning eyebrow, but Richard didn't say anything. 'It's one of the seals that locks the Keeper beyond. There are others, that still hold. Magic helps hold him back, for now.
The Stone of Tears has the power, though, to destroy the balance, to tear the veil and free the Keeper, if it is used in this world, by such as you, in the wrong way. You see, the Stone has the power to banish any soul to the infinite depths of the underworld. But if it were used in that way, through hate, through selfishness, it would feed power to that side, and destroy the veil.
The veil can only be restored by one with the gift for both sides of the magic. The Stone must be put back where it belongs.
'We must struggle to keep the other seals intact until the day when one such as you can restore this lock while there is still time. Meanwhile, the Keeper gains strength here. His minions struggle to break the other seals. There are other ways to free the Keeper.'
'Ann ... are you sure about me? Maybe ...'
'You proved it just tonight, by walking through that shield. Our shields are made of Additive Magic. The only way for you to penetrate it was for your Han to use Subtractive.'
'Maybe my Han, my Additive Magic, is just stronger.'
'When you came through the Valley of the Lost, you would have
been drawn to the towers. To both towers. Am I right?'
'I could have just come across them by accident.'
She let out a tired sigh. The towers were created by wizards who had both kinds of power. In the white tower, there is white sand. Sorcerer's sand. I doubt you would have taken any.'
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